An hour before he stepped on stage for the first performance of his one-man show, Jack Holden felt he shouldn’t be there. Cruise tells a euphoric, gut-wrenching, music-filled story set during the 1980s Aids crisis. “As a queer storyteller, there’s an immense pressure of diving into this important and harrowing period of time to do it justice,” Holden says, a look of concern on his face. “I was born in 1990. What do I know about the 80s?”
When he was in his early 20s, Holden began volunteering for Switchboard, a listening service for LGBTQ+ people in need of someone to talk to. One of the calls he got early on was from an older man who phoned on the anniversary of his partner’s death. “They had both contracted HIV in the mid-80s, when there was still no effective treatment,” he recalls. “They thought they had been given a death sentence and decided to spend all their money and go out with a bang.”
